Wikimedia’s complaint about NSA espionage dismissed for lack of evidence

The Maryland County Court in the United States has dismissed a Wikimedia case about espionage. The foundation questioned the constitutionality of the NSA’s mass surveillance of Americans, but did not have enough evidence to support it.

The ruling is almost the same as a decision in 2013 in a similar case. The intention to file a case against the National Security Agency and the Department of Justice was announced by the Wikimedia Foundation in March this year. The NSA and DoJ allegedly violated the First and Fourth Amendments to the US Constitution. They would do this with upstream surveillance in which the NSA collects data on the Internet from users who communicate with ‘non-US persons’ from the US.

Eight other ideological organizations rallied behind the case, being represented by the ACLU, a US civil rights movement. The precedent for rejecting the trial was already set in 2013, when Amnesty International, among others, tried to sue the NSA. The US Supreme Court dismissed the case as too speculative because it could not prove that the organizations had been spied on.

The charge in this Wikimedia vs. NSA case has to do with the fact that upstream surveillance, according to the US government, would be justified by the FISA amendment of 2008. The surveillance system relies on collaboration with companies that provide access to the backbone of the Internet. The NSA intercepts and copies private communications in bulk and searches the content for certain keywords associated with their targets by the NSA. The targets are not approved by a court of law or other regulatory body.

Amnesty argued that the NSA monitors employee work and communications because staff members frequently exchange information with non-Americans, such as emails with activists abroad. The aforementioned 2008 case was dismissed in February 2013 because it could not be proven that the prosecutors had been spied on. Edward Snowden is said to have said that this statement was one of the reasons for leaking the NSA information.